In Sri Lanka, justice for Eknelygoda is a waiting game

Three years ago, on January 24, 2010, columnist and cartoonistPrageeth Eknelygoda vanished
on his way to work to cover the final campaigning in Sri Lanka's bitterly
contested presidential election. He has not been heard from since. The pro-opposition
website he worked for, Lanka eNews, has been repeatedly
attacked,
its offices hit with arson, its staff arrested
and harassed,
its editor driven into exile in England.

Hearings into Eknelygoda's disappearance have been lumbering
on in the Magistrates Court in Homagama, a distant suburb of Colombo. They were
launched at the insistence of his wife, Sandhya, after she was unable to get an
answer to her request for information about her husband from any member or
agency of the government.

About the only official to make any comment
on the fate of Eknelygoda was former Attorney General Mohan Peiris, when he
answered questions at the U.N. Committee Against Torture in November 2011, in
Geneva. In January 2012, the magistrate ruled that
Peiris be
called in as a witness to explain what he knows about Eknelygoda's
disappearance, but the government dodged
this obligation.

Peiris had told the U.N. Committee Against Torture that
Eknelygoda took refuge in a foreign country and that the campaign to solve his
disappearance is a hoax--although he failed, then and ever since, to provide
information about where Eknelygoda has supposedly fled. The government's
attorney, appearing before the magistrate, argued that because Peiris had been
speaking on behalf of the government at the U.N., he cannot be held responsible
for his remarks and need not appear in court. The attorney said officials are
not required to disclose communications where "the public interest would
suffer," according to a person monitoring the court's hearings.

While it's doubtful Sri Lankan public interest would suffer
if Peiris were to tell what the government knows, it is even more unlikely that
he will be called again to testify, now that he has been appointed Chief
Justice of the Supreme Court. He came to office January 15 after his
predecessor, Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranayake, was impeached by Parliament,
which is led by President Mahinda Rajapaksa's ruling party.

The chief justice was charged in November 2012 with 14
counts of corruption, all of which she denied. She was found guilty of three of
the charges. The government denies it turned against her after some unfavorable
judgments, the BBC
reported.

Peiris had been waiting in the wings for the job for years, biding
his time as a special adviser to the cabinet after leaving the attorney
general's post he was holding back in February 2010, when he met
with CPJ in his office. At the end of our interview,
CPJ Deputy Director Rob Mahoney and I turned off our tape recorder and asked Peiris
to intervene in the Eknelygoda case in some way, any way, to ease the pain of
Sandhya and the couple's two teenage sons. The case was barely a month old at
the time, and he said he would look into it.

"This fight to find Prageeth is my belief," she told
CPJ by email this week (a friend translated her comments from Sinhala.) "His
case has become a leading indicator that there are serious human rights
violations that go unresolved in Sri Lanka. Lots of things will change in the
life of our two children, but we will continue this journey until we have
justice."

In the three years since Prageeth Eknelygoda disappeared,
interest in his case has waned. The Rajapaksa family and the government it
controls continue to cement their heavy-handed rule. Sandhya Eknelygoda at
times appears at international meetings to make her plea for assistance in her husband's
case and the cases of the many other disappeared in Sri Lanka. The United
Nations has repeatedly avoided coming to her assistance. Within Sri Lanka,
opposition media has been all but silenced, and a score or more journalists
have fled the country for their safety.

As former Chief Justice Bandaranayake put it to the BBC before she fled her
home--she said her life was in danger--"the very tenor of the rule of law,
natural justice, and judicial abeyance has not only been ousted, but brutally
mutilated."

Sandhya Eknelygoda says she agrees.

Bob Dietz, coordinator of CPJ’s Asia Program, has reported across the continent for news outlets such as CNN and Asiaweek. He has led numerous CPJ missions, including ones to Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka. Follow him on Twitter @cpjasia and Facebook @ CPJ Asia Desk.

Comments

The New Chief Justice, then Attorney General knows the whereabouts of Prageeth. He said he is in another country as a refugee. What on earth the Minister of Immigratiion and Emmigration is doing to find him>?? May be they do not want to find him. But now the Chief Justice must open his mouth. If not he is also considered as aiding and abbeting th abduction. will he open his mouth now?????????????????????????????????